Thursday, 29 May 2014

The Whig Revolution of 1688 led to
very deep and very wide disaffection among Catholics, High Churchmen,
Congregationalists, Baptists, Quakers and others.

Within those subcultures,
long after the death of the Stuart cause as such with Cardinal York in 1807,
there persisted a feeling that Hanoverian Britain, her Empire, and that
Empire’s capitalist ideology, imported and at least initially controlled from
William of Orange’s Netherlands, were less than fully legitimate.

This was to
have startlingly radical consequences.

First in seventeenth-century England
and then in the eighteenth-century France that looked to that precedent,
gentry-cum-mercantile republican absolutism was an inversion of Jean Bodin’s
princely absolutism, itself an Early Modern aberration.

But what of the
creation of a gentry-cum-mercantile republic in the former American Colonies?
Did it, too, ultimately derive from reaction against the Stuarts, inverting
their newfangled ideology against them?

No, it ultimately derived from loyalty
to them, a loyalty which regarded the Hanoverian monarchy as illegitimate.

Since 1776 predates 1789, the American
Republic is not a product of the Revolution, but nevertheless sits under a radically
orthodox theological critique, most obviously by reference to pre-Revolutionary
traditions of Catholic and Protestant republican thought.

On the Catholic side, that is perhaps Venetian. On the Protestant side, it is perhaps Dutch. On both sides, it is
perhaps to be found at cantonal level in Switzerland, where it is possible that such
thought might hold sway even now.

There simply were Protestant Dutch Republics
before the Revolution. There simply was a Catholic Venetian Republic before the
Revolution. There simply were, and there simply are, Protestant and Catholic
cantons in Switzerland, predating the Revolution. The literature must be there,
for those who can read the languages sufficiently well.

Furthermore, there is
no shortage of Americans whose ancestors came from the Netherlands or from
Italy, and there may well be many who assume from their surnames that their
bloodline is German or Italian (or possibly French) when in fact it is Swiss.

It is time for a few of them to go looking for these things, with a view to
applying them as the radically orthodox theological critique of that
pre-Revolutionary creation, the American Republic.

Within that wider context, far more
Jacobites went into exile from these Islands than Huguenots sought refuge here.

The Jacobites founded the Russian Navy of Peter the Great. They maintained a
network of merchants in the ports circling the Continent. Their banking
dynasties had branches in several great European cities. They introduced much
new science and technology to their host countries. They dominated the Swedish
East India and Madagascar Companies. They fought with the French in India.

And
very many of them ended up either in the West Indies or in North America. New
York seems the most obvious place to look for them, being named after its initial
proprietor as a colony, the future James VII and II.

The Highlanders in North
Carolina spoke Gaelic into the 1890s, but in vain had the rebellious
legislature there issued a manifesto in that language a century earlier: like
many people of directly Scots rather than of Scots-Irish origin or descent,
they remained loyal to the Crown during the Revolutionary War.

However, there were many Jacobite
Congregationalists, such as Edward Roberts, the exiled James’s emissary to the
anti-Williamite Dutch republics, and Edward Nosworthy, a gentleman of his Privy
Council both before and after 1688. There was that Catholic enclave, Maryland.

And there was Pennsylvania: almost, if almost, all of the Quakers were at least
initially Jacobites, and William Penn himself was arrested for Jacobitism four
times between 1689 and 1691.

Many Baptists were also Jacobites, and the name,
episcopal succession and several other features of the American Episcopal
Church derive, not from the Church of England, but from the staunchly Jacobite
Episcopal Church in Scotland, which provided the American Colonies with a
bishop, Samuel Seabury, in defiance of the Church of England and of the
Hanoverian monarchy to which it was attached.

Early Methodists were regularly
accused of Jacobitism. John Wesley himself had been a High Church missionary in
America, and Methodism was initially an outgrowth of pre-Tractarian, often at
least sentimentally Jacobite, High Churchmanship. Very many people conformed to
the Established Church but either refused to take the Oath or declared that
they would so refuse if called upon to take it.

With its anti-Calvinist
soteriology, it high sacramentalism and Eucharistic theology, and its hymnody
based on the liturgical year, early Methodism appealed to them. Wesley also
supported, and corresponded with, William Wilberforce, even refusing tea
because it was slave-grown; indeed, Wesley’s last letter was to Wilberforce.
They wrote as one High Tory to another.

Wilberforce was later a friend of
Blessed John Henry Newman, whose Letter to the Duke of Norfolk
constitutes the supreme Catholic contribution to the old Tory tradition of the
English Confessional State, in the same era as Henry Edward Manning’s Catholic
social activism, and the beginning of Catholic Social Teaching’s strong
critique of both capitalism and Marxism.

Whiggery, by contrast, had produced a
“free trade” even in “goods” that were human beings. The coalition against the
slave trade contained no shortage of Methodists, Baptists, Congregationalists
or Quakers.

Yet the slave trade was integral to the Whig Empire’s capitalist
ideology. If slavery were wrong, then something was wrong at a far deeper
level. James Edward Oglethorpe, a Jacobite, opposed slavery in Georgia.
Anti-slavery Southerners during the American Civil War were called “Tories”.

Radical Liberals were anti-capitalist in their opposition to opium dens, to
unregulated drinking and gambling, and to the compelling of people to work
seven-day weeks, all of which have returned as features of the British scene.

Catholics, Methodists,
Congregationalists, Baptists and Quakers fought as one for the extension of the
franchise and for other political reforms.

It was Disraeli, a Tory, who doubled
the franchise in response to that agitation. To demand or deliver such change
called seriously into question the legitimacy of the preceding Whig oligarchy.

It is almost impossible to overstate the importance of Catholicism, of the
Anglo-Catholicism that High Churchmanship mostly became at least to some
extent, of the Baptist and Reformed (including Congregational) traditions, and,
above all, of Methodism, to the emergence and development of the Labour
Movement.

Quakerism and Methodism, especially
the Primitive and Independent varieties, were in the forefront of opposition to
the First World War, which also produced the Guild of the Pope’s Peace, and
which had a following among Anglo-Catholics of either of what were then the
more extreme kinds, “English Use” and “Western Use”. Each of those included
Jacobites among, admittedly, its many eccentrics.

Above all in Wales, where
Catholic sentiment was still widely expressed in the old tongue well into the
eighteenth century, Quakers and Methodists had very recently stood shoulder to
shoulder with Presbyterians, Congregationalists and Baptists, including Lloyd
George, against the Boer War.

Paleoconservatives who would rightly
locate the great American experiment within a wider British tradition need to
recognise that that tradition encompasses the campaign against the slave trade,
the Radical and Tory use of State action against social evils, the extension of
the franchise, the creation of the Labour Movement, and the opposition to the
Boer and First World Wars.

All of those arose out of disaffection with Whiggery, with
the Whigs’ imported capitalist system, with their imported dynasty, and with
that system’s and that dynasty’s Empire.

A disaffection on the part of Catholics,
High Churchmen (and thus first Methodists and then also Anglo-Catholics, as
well as Scottish and therefore also American Episcopalians), Congregationalists,
Baptists, Quakers and others.

Behind these great movements for
social justice and for peace was still a sense that the present British State
(not any, but the one then in existence) was itself somehow less than fully
legitimate.

In other words, the view that there was ultimately something
profoundly wrong about this country and her policies, both domestic and
foreign, was a distant echo of an ancestral Jacobitism.

Radical action for
social justice and for peace derived from testing the State and its policies
against theologically grounded criteria of legitimacy.

Wednesday, 28 May 2014

Lord
knows, I am no fan of Michael Gove. But in the most recent dust-up over the
national English curriculum, he has matters exactly right – though seemingly
for all the wrong reasons.It is believable that he did indeed object to the
leftist bent of authors like John Steinbeck and made his decision accordingly,
as many academic commentators have suspected.But this being the case, why on
earth would he have favoured authors such as Shakespeare and Swift and Austen
and Dickens – each and every one of whom had a satirical streak and a profound
sense of moral outrage against the establishments of their respective times
lying simmering in their prose?

To
tell truth, I feel that modern writers and left social activists alike in
America as well as Britain stand to benefit more from King Lear, A Modest Proposal,
Gulliver’s Travels and A Tale of Two Cities than they do from
anything by the minimalistic and economical Steinbeck.Does Gove truly fancy
that the man who fashioned Ebenezer Scrooge to mock everything that is
un-Christian about Victorian Whiggism stands in his government’s ideological
corner?Or a man who took pains in his plays to highlight the tragic and self-destroying
propensities of the machiavel, that character type now so ubiquitous in
neoconservative political circles both British and American?Or a man who
castigated in the strongest terms the English nation for its abysmal and
inhumane treatment of the Irish, in the name of ‘sound principles’ of political
economy?Or, for that matter, a woman who clearly sympathised most with the
poor and penniless, and whose pen so deftly skewered the pretensions in manners
and law of the propertarian bourgeois society in which she grew up?

That will make the
Rt. Hon. Secretary of State for Education’s situation at present more pitiable,
but it will have no effect on her.

Or,
indeed, on any of them.

So
why this backlash from the academic left, of all people, against making the
works of twentieth-century America, of all things, optional for
high-school study?

The
secondary-school teacher I loved and respected most was a woman named Mrs. H—,
who taught English and the sciences. Being a Dane County state-school teacher,
she was as ‘progressive’ politically and economically as anyone else I knew,
and that is saying a great deal.But Mrs. H— was also an Anglophile, deeply
enamoured of William Shakespeare, and this showed readily in her teaching. She
took the entire class to performances of Macbeth
and A Comedy of Errors at American
Players’ Theatre in Spring Green, and even had us act out Macbeth for our school.Of the many things she imparted to me, one
that kept with me was best articulated by C. S. Lewis: ‘if [a reader] must read
only the new or the old, I would advise him to read the old’.

So I
do fully agree with Michael Gove that these English classics ought to enjoy
cultural privilege and priority – particularly in Britain! – over the newer and
less-challenging works of modern America at the height of its imperial prowess,
even if I find his reasons for doing so on every level mystifying.Has he
simply not read the works he is advocating for, or is he truly cynical enough
to believe their social and political significance will be lost on
secondary-school students?

And
Gove’s critics are quite right to frame the issue as an ideological one, as an
issue of values.The assigned reading lists of state schools are, whether
intentionally or not, statements of what those schools find valuable – so much
so, indeed, that they believe them indispensable for a child’s moral, emotional
and intellectual formation.

But
this consideration makes the reaction from English academia equally baffling if
not more so, because these people with their literary training ought to know better than Gove.Do they truly
think learning Shakespeare – whose plays still have such enduring appeal across
generations – ‘will just grind children down’, as Bethan Marshall of King’s
College remarked?Do they truly have so little faith in their own chosen profession that they can cast such aspersions
on the ability of Shakespeare (and Swift, and Austen, and Dickens) to engage
and even electrify the imaginations – including that theo-political imagination
from which flows all manner of demand for radical social reform – of young
people?Has the warning that Lewis himself advanced ‘against the dangers of an
exclusive contemporary diet’ already lost so much of its currency?

These
questions need to be asked of the self-appointed academic defenders of the
Americanist canon: What exactly is it that makes twentieth-century
American literature so indispensable when compared with the English classics?

What precisely is it that they imagine Arthur Miller can do for the moral,
emotional and intellectual upbuilding of young Britons that the Bard cannot?

Monday, 26 May 2014

Like the UMP and its numerous Gaullist and Giscardien predecessor formations, the Front National, rather than individuals, factions and tendencies within it,
is not immediately easy to locate within René Rémond’s theory of the three
French right wings, les trois droites.

Both the UMP and, to a lesser extent, the FN now
exhibit, far more than they used to, Orléanism as the bourgeois and
economically liberal Franco-Whiggery against which stand both the populist
traditionalism of the Legitimists and the populist authoritarianism of the
Bonapartists.

There is a certain continuation of Legitimism in
the more-or-less Lefebvrist wing of the FN and its electorate, but also in the
Social Catholicism of a section of the old UDF and of those who look to the
Gaullist conception of the strong French State with a strong Head to deliver
the goods.

Not for nothing did Philippe de Villiers
withdraw from the UDF over Maastricht as surely as Charles Pasqua withdrew
first internally and then externally from the RPR.

Although Gaullism does have obvious Bonapartist
roots, just as Boulangism did, yet the popular followings for either and both
were and are at least as much Legitimist, especially deep in the countryside.

Especially there, the anti-Gaullist Right is not
entirely Orléanist, either; not for nothing did it most recently rally to a man
whose name was not merely Giscard, but Giscard d’Estaing.

And from where does anyone think that the
popular constituency for an anti-Marxist Socialist Party first came from, or
very largely still does come?

Mitterrand could never decide whether he wanted
to be Louis XIV or Napoleon. But he certainly wanted to be one or the other.

Deep down, at least, one or the other was what
huge numbers of his voters wanted him to be, too. Otherwise, he would never have
won.

When he did win, he gave a job to Poujade, in
whom the Legitimist and Bonapartist populisms of the Right met, who had
endorsed him and who did so again.

To all of which, what says François Hollande,
who was endorsed, after all, both by François Bayrou and by Jacques Chirac?

But more, what says the UMP?

The Legitimists celebrated patois (it
was more than a century after the Revolution before anything more than half the
population of France spoke French), local festivals and folk-customs, the ancient
provincial boundaries, and everything else that Jacobins, Whigs, and their
imitators or collaborators would wish to iron out, to put it at its very
mildest, in the name of progress.

At present, the FN has a thoroughly républicain approach,
not only to regional peculiarities, but also and increasingly to secularism.

However, if a new movement is indeed arising out
of much or most of it and much or most of the UMP to give voice to those who
would thus rise in electoral revolt against an increasingly Islamised, or at
least to their mind no longer recognisably French, Île-de-France, then such a
movement is likely to be most popular the further from Paris one travelled both
geographically and culturally.

It is likely to be a movement very largely
conducted in Breton and Corsican, in Provençal and West Flemish, in Occitan and
Franconian, in Catalan and Alsatian (already spoken by a goodly number of FN
supporters), even in Basque.

And even in places not quite as different as
that, the call will be for ever-greater rural, traditional, Catholic, even
French-speaking autonomy from a centre actually or apparently less and less
characterised by such features, or even tolerant of them.

Thus, a movement sincerely intended to save
France might very well end up destroying her.

Pope Francis’s current visit to the State of Israel, like the visits of
his predecessors, represents the diplomatic relations that exist between the
Vatican and the Zionist state.

We are a large community of Orthodox
Jews who do not have relations with the State of Israel and who do not support its
existence. Let’s take a few minutes to understand the reasons for that.

We are living in tumultuous times.

In
the twentieth century, the Jewish people suffered the great tragedy of the Holocaust,
and then what seemed to be a miraculous rebirth in their original homeland, the
Holy Land.

Why would Orthodox Jews be against a Jewish state? Some think it is because the State of
Israel is a secular state.

But that is not a complete answer, because if
someone is doing something good (such as a volunteer ambulance service or an
organization to feed the poor) we support it regardless of whether the
activists are religious, secular or non-Jewish.

We praise the good that people
do, and at the same time we reach out to our brethren who are not religious and
try to show them the beauty of Torah.

So if having a state with an army were a
good thing according to all, no one would be against it just because the
leaders are irreligious. We would just try to make it more religious.

The best way to understand the real
reason why Orthodox Jews oppose the state is by looking at Jewish history.

The
Jewish people once had a state, in the time of the First and Second Temples.
That state was destroyed and we were driven into exile two thousand years ago.

The
Jewish belief has always been that “because of our sins we were exiled from our
land,” in the words of the Prayerbook.

The exile did not come because we were
weaker than our enemies; it came because it was G-d’s plan to atone for our
sins. Furthermore, it was G-d’s will that the Torah should be spread all over
the world.

It was always clear to the Jews that
just as their exile did not come about due to their own weakness, it could not
end with their own strength, only through repentance and the coming of the
messiah.

Because G-d wanted us to stay in exile,
He forbade us with an oath not to gather ourselves together and take over the
Holy Land, and not to fight wars against the other nations.

This oath are
written in the book of the Song of Songs and explained in the Talmud.

Because of this, when the Zionist idea
was proposed by Herzl about a hundred years ago, almost all the rabbis in the
world were opposed.

Even the rabbis who supported colonization in the Holy Land
said clearly that they did not intend to fight wars and take over the land.

Moreover, the rabbis feared that a
Jewish state would arouse the anger of the Arabs, who constituted 95% of the
population of the Holy Land at the time the British took over during World War
One. Wars would have to be waged, resulting in thousands of Jewish casualties.

After the state was founded, prominent
rabbis continued to oppose it.

For example, Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum (1887-1979),
was the most vocal opponent of Zionism at this time. He spoke for all his life
on the subject of Zionism and published two scholarly books on the subject,
proving that the existence of the state violated Jewish law.

Another vocal critic of Zionism was
Rabbi Yitzchok Zev Soloveitchik, who never ceased to cry over the destruction
and danger brought upon the Jewish people by the State of Israel.

Today there are large groups of Jews –
about half of the Orthodox world, in fact - who are opposed to the state on
principle and will not wave its flag or recite prayers for it.

It is often claimed that Jews who
oppose Zionism do not love the Holy Land, or do not care about the millions of
Jews living there. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Jews who oppose
Zionism love the Holy Land so much and yearn so much for the redemption that
they cannot stand to see the Holy Land turned into a mockery of the redemption
by people who could not wait for G-d to fulfil His promises.

Jews who oppose
Zionism love their fellow Jews in the Holy Land so much that they cannot stand
to see even one life lost for the sake of a state.

Zionists, on the other hand,
hear about Israeli army casualties and say, “This is the price we must pay to
have a state.”

One issue in which our opposition to
Zionism comes to the fore is the current effort by the Israeli government to
draft the Orthodox into its army, and the Orthodox refusal to comply.

People
ask: shouldn’t we do our share? The answer is that it is not only us Orthodox
Jews – no Jews should serve in the Israeli army. There should not be an Israeli
army or a state.

It would be like asking why Orthodox
Jews do not work on Saturday – shouldn’t they do their share of the work?

The
answer is, obviously, that no Jews are allowed to work on the Sabbath. It is
just that the Orthodox are the only Jews who actually follow Judaism and care
what the Torah has to say.

And while we cannot convince the
Israelis to give up their state at the present time, we must still maintain our
own adherence to the Torah, and we believe that in the end, the truth will
prevail.

Sunday, 25 May 2014

When Shimon Peres and Mahmoud Abbas kneel in prayer in Rome
alongside Pope Francis, in what capacity will each regard the other as being
there?

Being Israeli, as distinct from being Jewish, and being
Palestinian, as distinct from being Arab in general and Greater Syrian in
particular, are twin identities, created by exactly the same events at exactly
the same time, a time which is still within living memory.

Zionism and the modern concept ofFilastin(which, like Arab nationalism in
general, was and is an expression among the oldest inhabitants of the Landof popular Catholic, Orthodox and
Anglican Christianity as it organised itself politically among students at
American “mainline” Protestant missionary universities) were both new at the
time, and each had very few adherents, although of course those believed that
huge numbers of other people ought to agree and identify with them.

Now, in both cases, they do. By definition, there were no
Israelis before the creation of the State of Israel. But there are now, quite
distinct from Jews at large, and not all Jews in any case.

Even leaving aside the large and growing Arab population,
which is the majority in half of the land area within the 1948 borders, there
are Russians who refuse to eat kosher food and who insist on taking their
Israeli Defence Force oaths on the New Testament alone, the Russian Nazis, the
East Africans who have invented a religion based on the Old Testament brought
by Christian missionaries, and the Peruvian Indians, with even the Pashtun are
now classified as a Lost Tribe with a view to airlifting them to Israel in
future, since at least they are not Arabs.

If Israel does not want to become a haven for Russian
Nazis, then she needs to repeal the Law of Return, declaring that she is now a
settled culture and society in her own right, and precluding any wildly
impracticable demand for a corresponding right on the part of Palestinian
refugees or their descendants.

The people who will do anything for Israel except live
there, and who throw their weight around in demanding policies that suit their
prejudices expressed from comfortable berths thousands of miles away, could
thus be told where to go, or not to bother trying to go.

In any case, Theodor Herzl denied the possibility, once the
Zionist State had been founded, that Jews, as such, could then continue to
exist anywhere else. They would have lost the right to call themselves Jews,
according to the founding father of Zionism.

If Hamas really can never come to terms with the existence
of the State of Israel, simply as a fact of life, then with what did it imagine
itself to have been negotiating, thereby scoring the significant public
relations victory that was the release of hundreds of detainees in 2011?

For that matter, if Israel can never deal with Hamas, then
what was she doing in the case of Gilad Shalit, and would she rather that he
had been left to rot?

If there cannot be a Palestinian State, contrary to the
position of the last Republican President of the United States, then with whom
and with what have the Israelis ever been negotiating?

Those interlocutors do not seek recognition of a Muslim
state; on the contrary, the Palestinian Authority already operates a Christian
quota without parallel in Israel, though corresponding to similar arrangements
in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Iran. They do not even seek recognition of an
Arab state.

Ever since 1993, they have recognised Israel within her
borders before 1967, and, although they ought also to claim the territory to
the east that a Palestinian State would rapidly come to include, they seek
nothing more than recognition of Palestine within the territory captured in
that year, the home of everyone who lives there, and if anything an emerging or
emerged Orthodox Jewish refuge from godless Zionism.

The only problem is with recognising Israel as “a Jewish
State”, condemning a fifth of the population, including the world's most
ancient Christian communities, to the second class citizenship from which the
Israeli Constitution theoretically protects them, however different the
practice may be.

Monday, 19 May 2014

It is led by Mike Nattrass MEP, who
has stood at elections against the EU takeover since 1994. A vote here is a
vote to leave the EU. The party currently has two MEPs and eight Councillors.

AN
INDEPENDENCE FROM EUROPE rejects EU domination, as laws must be made at
Westminster.

Currently, EU pressure for its members to "privatise"
services causes concern. This fashion leads to threats of the privatisation of the NHS privatisation, which already struggles
with debt due to excessive interest charges from private funding.

The NHS does
not need privatisation of parts of the service, providing yet more costs and
loss of coordination.

The
global trading UK is restricted by EU domination and regulation. Leaving the EU
will provide better trade with the world, including our Commonwealth and the
EU.

Liberation
from the EU will close “open borders.” The UK will control the influx of people
by work permits and scrutiny, easing pressure on housing, schools, hospitals
and local authority services, whilst helping to employ unskilled workers and
the young.

The
cost of EU membership (more than £55m a day) is wasted money, which should be
invested in the UK.

The EU, having failed its accounts for 19 years, shows no
sign of stopping massive levels of fraud.

The
party say that back in the 1970s, Edward Heath assured voters that “The Common
Market” was about trade and would not affect sovereignty.

The status changed to
European Union (note the word Union), and the President of the Commission now
states, “This is the new European Empire into which you have pooled your
sovereignty.”

The fraud of our entry and surrender into the hands of the EU is well-known, and the people of the UK should repudiate any illegal agreement
seeking to take power from Westminster.

Regulations,
many unsuitable for the UK, are set into concrete by the EU. Changes, approved
by all 28 countries of the Union, make alterations next to impossible.

Thus, privatisation of our postal service and
post offices was lead by EU regulations stopping subsidy and opening up the
“monopoly”.

The Lib/Lab/Con Party voted for these regulations with apparent glee. The
subsequent result has been increases in stamp costs, more junk mail, and Post
Office closures.

Both party MEPs voted against these EU measures.

An
Independence from Europe says that Westminster is the place where UK law and
regulations must be made, not Brussels where “one size fits all” and
bureaucracy rules to the extent of insanity.

A vote for An Independence from Europe is a vote to leave the EU.

At
the top of your ballot paper is your option to vote clearly against EU
membership.

The
National Health Action Party was launched 18 months ago by doctors and health
workers seriously concerned at the impact of the government’s massive top down
NHS reorganisation.

This has wasted billions of pounds of taxpayers’
money. It has also led to the closure of
A&E departments and local hospitals, massive understaffing of doctors and
nurses, harmful rationing of care and the NHS 111 shambles.

One
of the co-founders is the former Independent MP and physician Dr Richard
Taylor, who won at two general elections campaigning against the closure of his
local hospital at Kidderminster.

The other is cancer specialist Clive Peedell,
who has announced he will be challenging David Cameron in Witney in 2015.

Their
vision is to create a party which will put the health of the nation back at the
heart of the nation and the heart of our national politics.

We
believe that the NHS means more than a system of healthcare. Its creation as a
social institution reflected national solidarity, expressed the values of equity
and universalism, and institutionalised the duty of government to care for all
in society.

The NHS marked out a space where the dictates of commerce were held
in check.

Those values are under attack from increasing commercialisation and
the Coalition’s Health & Social Care Act (2012), which removed the duty of
government to provide a health care service for all.

There
is clear evidence that the privatisation of the NHS is accelerating under this
government.

On just one day recently, £1.2bn of contracts were put out to
tender. Since last April 70% of all contracts put out to tender have gone to
non NHS commercial companies.

We
are standing a full slate of candidates in London in the Euro elections.

Our
principal candidates are healthcare professionals who have been involved in the
fight to save our services.

Our focus is on the NHS, which faces having the
privatisation irretrievably locked in by the Transatlantic Trade and Investment
Partnership (TTIP) agreement currently being negotiated between the EU and US.

We
are calling for the NHS to be exempted from this deal.

Our
policies are founded on the relationship between health and all other aspects
of our national economy.

Dr
Louise Irvine is standing in London as one of our candidates for the European
election. Dr Irvine is Chair of the Save Lewisham Hospital Campaign and led a
successful court action against Jeremy Hunt in both the High and Appeal Court
in defence of her hospital. She has this to say about the importance of your
vote:

“Our
key challenge in defending the NHS is that most people don’t know what is
happening to it – it is being privatised and starved of funds. They have been
kept deliberately in the dark. So anything which helps get the word out and
gains much needed attention on the issue is worth doing.

Winning
a Euro seat on a single NHS issue would have a huge impact. It would show
people were waking up to what was happening and were angry. It would put the
NHS on the political agenda. A recent poll showed that 1 in 4 people think the
NHS is the most important political issue yet this is not reflected in media
coverage.”

We are also standing a small number of candidates at local council
level, in Cheltenham (St Paul’s ward), Rotherham (Sitwell ward), Plymouth
(Plympton St Mary ward), Liverpool (Anfield & Wavertree wards), Enfield
(Town ward) and Fulham (Munster ward).

Last time about a third of
the British electorate voted in the European elections. Two thirds did not
bother. Most Europeans did not bother. Why should they have?

The European Parliament
cannot change anything. It rarely knows what is going on. The unelected
European Commission initiates policy, agrees with the Council in secret how to
shape legislation and gets the federalists in Parliament to rubber stamp almost
everything whether they are aware of what is happening or not.

The European Court of
Justice will always paper over any cracks with legal approval later.

There is no official
opposition in the Parliament. There would be no point of having one. It might
conceivably vote out the Commission (this happened once) but most Commissioners
would just return (they did last time) and the same politicians and bureaucrats
would run things.

Party manifestoes in
European elections cannot therefore make promises that can be implemented.
There is no democratically elected government to change or toss out of office.

The EU is anti-democratic.
It is run by people who failed at politics in their own states (Brittan,
Kinnock, Patten, Mandleson etc.). Baroness Ashton, the Labour Party’s former
quango queen, who heads foreign affairs, has never been elected to anything in
her life.

When small states vote down
treaties in referendums, they are forced to vote again till they get it right.
The Constitutional Treaty which was voted down by the French and Dutch was, of
course, altered by 5% and pushed through parliaments as the Lisbon Treaty.

Since these treaties are
all technically amendments to the Treaty of Rome, they should all fail if they
do not achieve the necessary unanimous vote. They should never be resurrected.
People who oppose them cannot ask for new votes in states that vote yes.

Yet what Brussels wants,
Brussels gets.

Recently that has included
imposing technocratic governments to replace elected ones in Greece and Italy,
and ordering these governments and others to pass precise legislation according
to a precise timetable designed in Brussels and Berlin.

In any case, according to the Interior Ministry in Berlin, 80% of all European
domestic legislation now originates in Brussels anyway. The leader of the EU
Liberals, Graham Watson, put the figure at 75%.

The EU is also corrupt. Its expenses, salaries, perks and pensions are an
affront to the European unemployed created by its failed single currency
experiment.

Its accounts have not been signed off by the European Court of Auditors for at
least eighteen years. If it were a trading company it would have to cease
trading.

Membership costs a bomb. According to independent cost-benefit analyses the
annual cost of EU membership to Britain is about 4% of GDP –10% if opportunity
costs are factored in. That is £40 billion or £100 billion.

But is the EU really necessary?

It represents a rapidly declining share of world GDP; has no defence or
security profile; has no influence in foreign affairs; and is in demographic
decline. Once Germany’s population goes down by 20% over the next few decades,
its leading economy will be sunk.

So why keep this useless bureaucratic monstrosity? To stop war in Europe? The
only threat to Europeans after 1945 was posed by the USSR. That was
deterred by NATO and the USA’s nuclear arsenal, not the EU.
To raise living standards? It doesn’t do that anymore. No, we need a post-EU
Europe.

Please do not vote in the forthcoming European elections. The mainstream
parties are peddling lies about the EU and its benefits.

UKIP, which I founded, has no reason to be there. Its previous MEPs have mostly
been incompetents or charlatans, who play no constructive part in the
parliament and have been corrupted by expenses.

We shall soon be asked to cast our vote
on the Euro Elections, a mysterious organisation to most people who are largely
bewildered as to membership implications.Can they be blamed? Public sector
broadcasting and the press, both extremely partisan never seem to bother to
outline how it works or how it affects their lives.

Over 70% of our law now comes from
Brussels. The only serious in depth study on Brussels and National Law was by
the German Government who came to the figure of 80%. These estimates are broadly
unchallenged by the Commission or Bureaucracy.At election time some
politicians try to spin it is 10% because the House of Commons only logs
community law via a rather arcane assessment procedure. This is too absurd to
go into here.English Law is based on common law and statute law and can be
traced, as a system, back to the time of Alfred the Great. Well before Magna
Carta.

European Law, Corpus Juris or Napoleonic
Code if you prefer is prescriptive. It tells you that which you may do rather
than that which you may not. This means since joining the EU our system has
been overtaken by the highly legalistic approach to government.We now have had
more law passed since 1997 than the entire period from the Bill of Rights of
1688/9 to the election of the Blair government. In the last 10 years I have
seen about 2000 pieces of legislation a year go through the ‘parliament’ which
is the amending chamber. Most of it is trivial.Or is it? A few examples,
novelty food ingredients, bottle shapes and sizes, tractor seats, tail gate
lights and light filaments, the list is endless. Energy, food labelling,
fishery, agriculture, employment policy all come from Brussels.My desk in the
last 10 years has been swamped with pleas from small businesses to vote against
some piece of legislation. The effect of which would be to put them out of
business. Three packaging companies, a bottling plant and a vending machine
company to mention just a few.

The lawyer, regulator and civil servant
love all this. Jobs for the boys.Big businesses dislikes it but know that the
unholy political alliance works in their favour. Small and medium size
businesses account for nearly 80% of the UK economy and they are in despair.

The political rhetoric is less than
helpful. Almost impossible to discern the truth and then translate it into the
sound bite land of television.‘3 million jobs depend on our membership’, an
absurdity of infinite and obvious stupidity. The proposition that political
union is essential to trade is economically illiterate on an awesome scale.Over 40 countries now have completely free trade agreements with the EU without
the baggage of petty regulation that spews forth from it.Stand at the
roundabout in Durham City and watch Hyundai’s, Kia’s, Subaru’s and Jeep’s shoot
past. Our shops are stuffed with Chinese goods. Your vacuum cleaner was
probably made in Malaysia.The argument is to frighten the factory workers
whose company has a European export market. Is it likely they will impose
tariffs when we are massive net importers from Europe?

Will BMW, Mercedes and Volkswagen stand
for tariffs? Of course not. Our trade grows exponentially with North America
and the Far East. It continues to shrink with the EU.

Demographically and economically
the EU is in decline. Addicted to welfarism, statism, bureaucracy and crony
capitalism we are already entering the end game.

Youth unemployment is 50% in Greece,
Southern Italy and the Iberian Peninsula. Averages 30% everywhere else with the
exception of Germany (9%). This is unsustainable in any society.

Even Germany who bankrolls the EU has a
debt ratio of 80% of GDP. It is owed £900 billion by the shadow banking system.

Like the rest of the world, government debt is beyond any hope of repayment and default
or hyperinflation is the inevitable outcome. No it is not different this time.

So, whom do you vote for in the
election?

The fiat currency debt Tsunami will actually make it irrelevant as
the EU in five years time will not exist as it does now.

If you believe in the European dream,
which is not incidentally an ignoble one, the honest vote is Liberal Democrat.

If you want self-government, or indeed even self-misgovernment, vote UKIP.

It follows that Londoners need a strong voice in the European Parliament to
safeguard jobs, pensions and public services.

Europe’s strongest political party is the mainstream EPP European People’s
Party.

The EPP is the party of Germany’s Angela Merkel, Ireland’s Enda Kenny, Poland’s
Donald Tusk, and Sweden’s Fredrik Reinfeldt.

These are leaders who should be Britain’s closest friends and allies in
reforming Europe. Unfortunately for Britain, the Conservatives left the EPP in
2009.

In the 2009-14 European Parliament, there were more EPP MEPs than in the Tory
plus UKIP plus Green plus LibDem groups combined.

This matters for many reasons.

A study by the London School of Economics shows the Conservatives in the
European Parliament are weak and marginalised.

The bigoted anti-women, anti-gay and anti-green views within the Conservative
group’s odd collection of fringe parties clash with London’s
openness. Indeed, since January 2013 in two votes out of three, the
Conservatives’ group sided with UKIP’s.

As at the time of writing this article, disturbing revelations have come to
light about the Tories’ discussions with hard right parties in an attempt to
save the group they created on leaving the EPP.

VoteWatch Europe’s data reveals that the UKIP and Tory lead candidates in
London have missed so many roll call votes they are in the bottom 10 per cent
of MEPs.

As for the Liberals’ EU group, the British and Germans currently form the
largest delegations. But YouGov surveys suggest only 1 in 4 of those who
intended to vote LibDem in 2010 intend to do so in 2014.

In Germany’s 2009 General Election, Liberals had won 93 seats, but they lost
every single one in 2013. London needs not a declining, but a strong and
growing, voice.

The EPP is not only by far the strongest party: it is the best available party.

In the last five years, the EPP secured billions of pounds to get young people
into work, help 4 million Europeans to train, and help 300,000 small firms.

The EPP simplified rules for small firms but strengthened consumer and health
rights, environmental protection and external border controls.

We support the 4 Freedoms in President FD Roosevelt’s iconic 1941 Address:
freedoms of speech and faith, freedoms from want and fear.

We also support the 4 core EU freedoms of movement of people, goods, services
and capital. This is no licence to defraud social security.

We believe government should be local to people. People know best what works
for them and Brussels and Whitehall must listen to them.

More broadly, the EPP believes every person deserves the greatest chance of
fulfilment.

This includes both helping businesses to offer good and sustainable jobs, and
also offering protection with dignity to the vulnerable.

It is a harshness sapping the soul of society when billionaires are richer than
ever but others are having to turn to soup kitchens.

British politicians, not “Brussels”, are responsible for problems like housing
shortages, educational and training shortfalls, archaic transport, aircraft
carriers without planes, and substandard cancer care.

The truth is London needs Europe and Europe needs London: we all need reform!

In this election, we offer a strong team with real business experience and
knowhow on getting results in Brussels.

Our candidates include an Irish woman, a British man with a Polish father, a
French woman, and native Londoners.

As MEPs in Europe’s strongest Party, we will restore London’s strong voice:
Europe’s leading city, Europe’s leading party.

We a strong economy with opportunity for the young, alongside protection and
dignity for the vulnerable.
Although this is not a General Election, others dwell in their Manifestos on
issues for the British Parliament to decide: sterling, referendum, and
opt outs.

We will focus on safeguarding millions of Londoners’ future jobs. We have five
priorities:-

help
Londoners to do more business anywhere in Europe and beyond. We agree with
the CBI and TheCityUK: Europe must be more open and complete major trade
deals with, for example, the USA.

digital
union not digital divide: 1 in 4 new jobs for Londoners comes from
technology. London needs an EU single digital market. We support free WiFi
across Europe.

improved
education, skills and training for all Londoners, regardless of postcode:
we will help you to benefit from open opportunities for education,
training and work experience such as the 40 per cent increase secured by
the EPP in the Erasmus+ scheme.

lighter
regulation for smaller firms: most Londoners work for smaller firms. We
agree with what the Federation of Small Businesses says that they need.

safeguarding
freedom, justice and the environment: Thames winter floods reminded us
that London depends on a healthy planet. All Europeans need affordable,
secure and sustainable energy.

Treating people with dignity includes safeguarding freedom and human rights
such as privacy and protection, for example from terrorism and crime.

We offer what people want: we are experiencing exceptionally high correlation
between awareness and support.While the converse is also true, it is certain that if sufficient Londoners
know what we offer, we will do well.

There
is something slightly strange about politics in the UK at the moment. Something
that doesn't get that much coverage in the media hubub. It's something that
isn't upfront in most politicians' election campaigns. If you take a moment to look, you can see it
almost everywhere.

During
last year's local elections, the one thing that Pirate Party activists were told time
and again by the people we spoke to, whether on the doorstep, in their flats
or on the street, was:

"I
don't vote, because it doesn't change anything."

There
is a sense of powerlessness over the forces that shape our lives and the space
around us. A feeling that decisions are made but we aren't included. That governments whether local, national or
European can do what they do regardless of what we want.

Ever
increasing privatisation means many aspects of our society, from housing to the
NHS, are being divided up and parcelled out. It can be impossible to find out
who is responsible for the most basic aspects of our environment, public space and
services, let alone get anyone to do anything.

Huge
companies, vested interests and foreign governments seem to get more of a say than we do
in the agreements that shape our economy and society. We are left
out, where we should be at the heart of decision making. We are kept in the dark,
when we should be being kept informed.

There
are plenty of problems.

In
the UK, we are constantly scrutinised and monitored, whether it is by Europe's
biggest array of surveillance cameras, or by our own and 'friendly' intelligence
services. Here in the UK, companies like ATOS are paid to check we are ill
enough to be off work.

When
it comes right down to it, in a country of physical barriers, many of us look to
the internet as a place where we might retain some freedom, some control. But
here too, as we have heard from whistleblowers and from our own governments, we are
increasingly to be watched, restricted and monitored. The result of that
snooping is targeted advertising, social analysis, and intelligence reports. The
product is you.

We
never hear about freedom of movement anymore. About the ability to live, work
and play anywhere in Europe. Remember, it cuts both ways. All we hear is how one
party or another may deal with the 'problem of migration'. The same isn't applied to the free movement
of goods or services. Of course not!

Do
we want to live in a society where our jobs can be sent abroad to the lowest
bidder, but we can't follow? Where European workers can't come to the UK to
improve their lot and give us the benefit of their skills? Limiting that one
freedom changes the balance, but not in our favour.

Oh,
and the customs queue at Manchester airport will be murder.

That
can't go on.

Our
government has created a state where the default answer is 'No'. In this 'No' cultur,e it's not surprising that
people begin to feel that nothing can change. This is, more than anything, what
the Pirate Party wants to change.

Yes,
people know us best for talking about digital rights, yet at the heart of our
politics is the right of everyone to share knowledge, to innovate and to prosper.
That is the way to take control over the world around us.

This
is especially true when it comes to the European Union. Too many of our
politicians are doing what they think might win them votes. Rather than talking
about policy, they are shouting about personalities. Rather than fixing the problems with the
European Union, and there are many, they would rather use them as an excuse to
do nothing. Our politicians prefer to say 'No' to change, 'No' to innovation
and 'No' to building a better Europe.

There
are solutions...

The
Pirate Party isn't like that. We want Europe to work, and we want the chance to
convince you to be part of a Europe that works.

For
us, that means holding a referendum on our membership of the EU. It means making
the case for the changes that are needed so that we remain a member. We need to
be part of a better European Union.

We
don't accept that the European Union can't be fixed, or that it is broken beyond
repair. We know that our elected representatives in Europe need to hold the
balance of power, to be able to make the changes needed, to introduce
legislation and to respond to the need of those who elected them. Right now,
they don't.

Vote
Pirate

We
know that we can help to build a society which breaks the feeling of
powerlessness. A European Union where
our voices are heard and our concerns addressed. This won't be an easy task.

In
Europe, we will need to curb the influence of lobbyists. We will need to cooperate with other European
countries to address the democratic and structural issues we see.

The
ideas are right here, they shouldn't come from pure ideology, dogma or
think-tanks. Every policy is just an idea, a way to do it, and evidence that it
will work. Everybody can get involved in that, everyone has something to
contribute.

That
is why we are standing three excellent candidates in Dr Maria Aretoulaki, Dr
George Walkden and Jack Allnutt. Maria is a small business owner in Manchester,
George is a University Lecturer and Jack is a committed civil liberties
activist. We know that they can help bringout
the ideas that we need, share them, and
work to have them implemented in the European Parliament.

We
have enough experience to know that it won't be easy; we are not naive. But it
can and will be done. The test will be to see if the same voters in years to
come feel that they really can change something, because by voting Pirate on the
22nd of May they will.

The Lanchester Review is grateful to Brian Denny of No2EU for
this, the late Bob Crow’s last ever article:

On May 22, we are asking you to lend us your vote and back No2EU: Yes to
Workers' Rights, an electoral coalition that supports workers' rights, decent
public services and peace. The European Union is a threat to all those things.

Across Europe, unemployment is exploding while the EU intensifies its
attacks on workers' and trade union rights and the public services they rely
on.

On top of that, the EU is deploying troops in Africa on the pretext of
humanitarian intervention while funding fascists in Ukraine to overthrow the
elected government.

All these imperialist antics are being carried out in our name as, under
the Lisbon Treaty, we are now EU "citizens."

Public services, including postal, transport, energy, education and
health services, are being privatised as part of the EU austerity agenda being
imposed on member states by unaccountable EU institutions.

But the voices of working people are not being heard.

The failure of the major parties to represent them has led to a
political vacuum which is being filled by Tory outriders like Ukip or, worse,
groups like the British National Party.

Yet the major parties, including the Green Party, continue to tell
workers to put up with EU membership because of alleged benefits from EU
legislation such as the working time directive and the agency workers' directive.

But these very limited and fast-disappearing "rights"
represent little more than a sugar-coating for the EU liberalisation and
privatisation agenda.

Moreover, none of these "rights" deal effectively with mass
unemployment or the introduction of zero-hours contracts and low-paid workers
being forced to work in multiple jobs.

So why haven't the much-lauded EU Agency Work Regulations defended these
vulnerable workers?

First, the regulations that claim to ensure agency workers enjoy the
same basic pay and conditions as permanent workers only kick in after 12 weeks
on the same temporary assignment.

Then the so-called "Swedish derogation" in the regulations
assists employers to avoid any obligation for workers to receive basic pay and
conditions comparable to a permanent worker.

The directive is actually normalising casualised labour as a new reality
for millions of workers.

The EU is also stripping workers of their rights through harsh
anti-trade union EU court rulings and strict bailout conditions on many states.

For instance, in Romania the EU has demanded an end to collective
bargaining. In a country where 98 per cent of workers were previously covered
by collective agreements, that figure has been reduced to little over 20 per
cent.

The EU is imposing endless austerity on hundreds of millions of people
through series of treaties, diktats, directives and bailouts at the behest of
big business and the banks that caused the current financial crisis.

This is driving millions into poverty across Europe by imposing
austerity measures particularly in countries like Greece, Ireland, Portugal and
Cyprus, among others. The pro-EU Tory-Lib Dem Coalition is happy to follow
suit.

The EU and the US are also currently secretly negotiating a treaty
designed to open all service sectors, including health, to so-called
"competition."

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) poses a severe
threat to the very existence of our National Health Service.

TTIP opens all public services to competition, and healthcare is treated
the same as education, construction, transport or waste disposal as another
opportunity for profit.

Under TTIP, lawsuits can be brought against national governments, and a
panel of lawyers will award damages based solely on commercial considerations.

This is being imposed without democratic discussion, negotiated by the
EU and requiring no approval of national parliaments.

This EU business model of liberalisation, privatisation and
fragmentation is already doing a lot of damage to our transport and postal
services in the name of corporate profits.

Under the EU's fourth rail package, the EU is pushing for the
introduction of compulsory competitive tendering and privatisation for all rail
services across Europe.

But No2EU wants to see a different Europe - one made up of democratic
states that value public services and do not offer them to profiteers, states
that do not put the interests of big business above that of ordinary people. We
believe that EU structures and rules make this impossible.

Vote No2EU on May 22 to say:

Yes to workers' rights;

Yes to an exit from the EU on the basis of socialist policies;

Yes to keeping Britain out of the eurozone;

No
to austerity whether from Brussels or from Britain;

Yes to the rejection of all EU treaties and directives that curtail
democracy, encourage social dumping and demand privatisation;

No
to EU trade agreements like the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership
with the US which threaten our NHS;

Yes
to scrapping EU rules preventing member states' control over economic policies;

Yes
to the development of sustainable manufacturing, agriculture and fishing
industries in Britain;

Yes
to the repeal of anti-trade union EU court rulings;

No
to racism and fascism, and Yes to international solidarity of working people;